Okay, I’ve actually got a couple more things to say than that, but most of them are about how Sony are a bunch of jerks, and how, with all due respect, I’m gonna have to go ahead and disagree with Liz Louche about the whole Santa Claus/fairy godparents connection (actually, fwiw, I’m starting to wonder if corporate record labels really only care about money, and not at all about the smiles that may or may not light up our little faces come Christmas/Easter/Monday morning).

First, according to the Associated Press, it turns out Lauryn Hill is going to prison after all, despite her recently inked deal with Sony. She’ll spend three months in prison and an additional three months in “home confinement.” #thanksSony, am I right? I mean, it’s not her fault she got a little “mis-educated” about tax policy. You had one job, Sony! Geez. It gets worse though. Apparently the corporate suits at Sony are forcing Ms. Hill to fulfill her five-song contract EVEN THOUGH THEY DID NOT STOP UNCLE SAM FROM SENDING HER TO THE CLINK. Un-freaking-real! I’ll even bet the bigwigs at Sony are in bed with some of the mediumwigs at the IRS, trying to squeeze every last ounce of creative and monetary blood, sweat, and tears out of her. For her part, Ms. Hill is exuding all sorts of rebellious energy, throwing off the shackles of corporate control the best way she knows how: by adding a parenthetical onto the title of her song, “Neurotic Society (Compulsory Mix).” Get it! You can find her note about the song on her Facebook, and purchase the song from iTunes.

Boyd Rice gets around like a cat in heat. He’s worked with everyone up to and including Frank Tovey, Coil, Chris and Cosey, and David Tibet. Now he is teaming with Wes Eisold of Cold Cave to bring doom, gloom, and that wonderful brew of industrial he does so well to exactly 10 cities in North America.

*sigh*

Really, here’s hoping this is the tour he finally pulls out all the stops and goes full Tiki. No more black curtains, hyper-bright aggressive spotlights, and ambiguous use of Nazi imagery. It’s time for little wooden Tiki idols, Hawaiian shirts, and Zombies with little fiddly umbrellas in them. His synthesizer will be covered in dashboard hula girls that’ll be rocking out right along with him. Maybe he can draw little pentagrams on their tummies, just to keep all parties satisfied. I don’t know if all this would fit with his most recent album, Back to Mono, which I’d imagine is the focus of this tour, but a boy can dream. Maybe dreaming hard enough will get us all an appearance by The Rock Cats.

A new era is upon us. The old ways no longer make sense. The stars no longer chart our courses. A new animal had to be added to the Chinese Zodiac, that’s how CRAZY shit is getting. That new animal is gap-toothed rock ‘n’ roll charmer Mac DeMarco, the Montreal weirdo pop madman who has been steadily conquering the supple, pliant, silky eardrums of music fans everywhere, a man who’s basically the living, walking, breathing embodiment of a Tiger Beat cover from Hell. He’s partying with snakes and tigers and rats and what-have-you, turning fortune cookies into cookie DUST with one fateful strum of his guitar. And now this wild, flannel-loving genius is coming to a town near you, and you, and YOU! Yes, even you, Saskatchewan. It is a new era indeed.

Mac’s hitting the road this summer for an epic US/Canada tour, featuring stops at Halifax, Nova Scotia’s OBEY Festival, Tennessee’s Bonnaroo, Calgary’s Sled Island Festival, Quebec City’s Summer Festival (someone take me to this, it sounds Frenchified and wonderful), and wrapping up at Chicago’s Pitchfork Fest. Dude just finished a huge tour with Phoenix, so you know his tourin’ shoes are still tap-tap-tapping at the door to get out again. Until that first June tour date, however, fans will have the creepy magic of the Alex Lill-directed video for “My Kind of Woman” to keep them warm (or chilled, depending on how you respond to DeMarco’s crazed Joker eyes and spidery mascara.)

You’re never going to believe this, readers, but the Atlanta-based “dirty-southern” punk band Deerhunter just had the best idea that anyone’s ever had! (I’m pretty sure Bradford Cox either thought of it himself or cleverly appropriated it from an idea jointly hatched at some historically significant moment in rock’s past by Iggy Pop and John Cage). See, they had a new album come out yesterday, and on the SAME DAY, they announced a gigantic tour of Europe, North America, and beyond for the next thousand months that starts pretty much next week!

Don’t you see the genius here? Now they can play music from the new record AT these live shows, thereby simultaneously increasing the likelihood that a) fans who don’t own the record will be won over by what they hear and see from the stage and proceed to purchase it based on the positive concert experience they’ve just had; and b) fans who arrive at the show having previously purchased the album will have their affinity for certain tracks reinforced by experiencing the presumably more visceral and immediate “live versions” of those tracks, thereby sorta “sealing the deal,” as it were, on those fans’ general, you know, geeked-out love of Deerhunter. In other words, they’ve found a way to LITERALLY turn commerce on its METAPHORICAL EAR and impregnate that ear with John Lennon’s frozen semen to create a true post-historical Gesamtkunstwerk of Art-commerce metafusion! Well, the whole idea is actually all a little more “Berlin” than that, but you get the idea.

Deerhunter dates (I know a lot of these sound suspiciously like venues, but trust me, they are all garages):

Get this: Neutral Milk Hotel reunite for a small world tour. I report this. A week passes — they announce 11 more shows, from Baltimore to Chattanooga to Melbourne. I’m on it again. So far so good.

But now I get word of another batch of shows in the East and Midwest being announced sometime in the near future. This I can’t report on. I really want to, but it’s impossible. The details just haven’t been released yet. It’s actually kind of bullshit. These new shows are fine, but what about the shows we don’t know anything about? Why don’t we know what they are? I’d like to know. These new dates are old now and I want the newer ones. I want them. Give me the newer dates. What are they.

The bedazzled disco witches over at Italians Do It Better are stirring up a few new releases/reissues/whatever-ya-wanna-call-‘em at some undisclosed, mysterious point in the near future. Disco witches never reveal their secrets… until their magic ear potions are almost up in stores, of course. Witches are capitalists, too, y’all! Anyway, the tripped-out Candyland world that brought you Chromatics and Symmetry is bringing you some more of what you like, with a virtual cornucopia of releases from said artists.

Conjured up from some seriously magickal spellwork comes the vinyl version of Chromatics’ Running from the Sun release, which includes a bunch of gems from the Kill for Love (TMT Review) sessions that didn’t make it onto that album. These include an alternate take on the track “Kill for Love” and a cover of the Rodgers and Hart song that made yer grandma squeal, “Blue Moon.” The disco witches have also stewed up a couple 12-inch releases of previously released tracks “Cherry” and “Tick of the Clock.” Plus: The Messenger, an album by label wizard Johnny Jewel’s Symmetry project that only got a promo release back in 2011 but is now getting a proper vinyl release. Look for these in stores on a date that is not today.

Chromatics’ Running From the Sun tracklisting:

01. Dreaming in Color
02. Red Car
03. Kill for Love
04. Last Wish
05. Running From the Sun
06. Disintegration
07. These Streets Will Never Look the Same
08. Blue Moon

Chromatics’ Tick of the Clock 12-inch tracklisting:

01. Tick of the Clock (Film Edit)
02. Tick of the Clock (Visione’s The Stroke of Midnight Remix)
03. Tick of the Clock (Extended Overdrive)